The first flakes of the new year began to fall just as I began to walk around the National Western Center on a Saturday morning, a sparse lot of vehicles parked here and there.

If this 100-acre hillside could talk, I thought, it’d tell stories about a billion or so cow pies that fell on its head, the greenhorns, the stockmen and the cowpunchers it has known.

It could tell about that time I wrote a story about a monkey that rides a dog that herds cattle, the damnedest thing I ever saw. His name was Whiplash, the Cowboy Monkey. Since I was a journalist of some note in this city at the time, I felt entitled to meet the monkey. I talked my way to its handler, but the monkey was resting and wasn’t taking visitors. It was an out-of-town monkey, I told myself.

In two decades, I’ve walked all over this place. There’s hardly an inch of it I’m not familiar with, or where I couldn’t attach a memory.

There’s only been one other time like this since the National Western Stock Show began in 1906, though.

In 1915, the annual spectacle was iced for a virus taking livestock, called hoof and mouth disease, which today is considered a bioterrorism threat.

It broke out in Michigan the summer before, then spread like wildfire to 20 states through the Chicago Stockyards. By the time it faded out that year, 172,000 cows, sheep and pigs were dead, a figure higher than the human population of Wyoming at the time. 

Denver was still a dusty capital city trying to figure out its national identity. Leaders knew if they hoped to emulate the great metropolises of the east, they wouldn’t get there on the booms and busts of hardrock mining, or the grifters and madams on Market Street. 

A generation before, railroad barons plotting their lines called Denver “too dead to bury.” Once they yielded, the city became a cow town. The stockyards and stables were effectively the city hall and chamber of commerce. Denver has traded more cows out than it might ever recoup in vapes and joints.

Red Rocks Amphitheater opened the same year as the stock show, and so did the Denver Mint, two years into the first term of Mayor Robert Speer, who would later die in the flu pandemic of 1918.

It was a year before the Mammoth Roller Skating Rink opened near East High School on East Colfax Avenue. We know it today as the Fillmore Auditorium, where I’ve seen more shows than I could name.

The stock show grounds divide the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, always home to North Denver’s working class. The stench of a massive stockyard nearby smelled like money, and once a year the cowboy carnival arrived.

Yet, soon after it began, the National Western became a red-letter social event. People came to town, along with livestock, from all over the West to see and be seen.

I caught up with my good friend Paul Andrews, the show’s president and CEO, the Friday before its normal opening. I know the man pretty well, so I can tell you that putting him on the sideline this time of year is like locking the gate in the bull-riding arena.

The show courses through his DNA.

But let me back up: Before Paul took the reins at the National Western in 2011, he was the executive vice president for Kroenke Sports Enterprises, plying his trade with human athletes.

He grew up in Lakewood and graduated from Alameda High, while he worked like a mule on his grandfather’s 5,500-acre ranch north of Golden, before shipping off to the University of Wyoming.

His grandfather, the late Paul Pattridge, exhibited at the stock show for 44 years. He was inducted into the American Polled Hereford Association Hall of Fame, chaired the Jefferson County 4-H Foundation and served on the stock show’s board of directors.

The show is etched painfully into the family story, as well. Paul Pattridge Jr., the stock show chief’s uncle, was flying from his home in Mississippi to the National Western in 1964 to once again serve as the show’s veterinarian, when the plane went down and he was killed.

If anybody knows about the show’s generational legacy, well, Paul has lived it.

“It’s a long tradition with my family, like a lot of people’s family, that I’m excited to carry on,” he said. “I hope there’s somebody making decisions about new facilities at the stock show in another hundred years.”

The National Western is undergoing a major redevelopment using a tourist tax approved overwhelmingly by city voters in 2015. The progress, like everything else, is on hold while the economy is stalled out.

Someday soon the yards and new events center will open, and when it does you can spot salvaged bricks and wood from the original grounds prominent in the design.

“That fabric is going to be woven into all those new areas,” Paul said, “so we can honor the past and celebrate the future.”

The National Western is part of the fabric of our city, and to live here you need to know that and experience that and, if you can, feel that.

I can’t wait for 2022.